


Personal Effects

by lorcaswhisky (aristofranes)



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: F/M, Gen, Grief, but there is a heavy-handed reference to the Odyssey, diary woes, in which Kat is the practical one again, of a very practical sort, recollections, so that's good, storage locker administration, there is very little plot to be found here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-07
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-05-19 08:51:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14870618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aristofranes/pseuds/lorcaswhisky
Summary: It wasn’t standard procedure. An Admiral dealing with the personal effects of one of her officers.Nobody seemed particularly surprised about it, though.Clearly they hadn't flown quite as far below the radar as they'd thought.Katrina picks up the pieces Gabriel left behind.





	Personal Effects

**Author's Note:**

> There are some small references to characters from my fic _The Buran_ (https://archiveofourown.org/works/14124849), but it's really not necessary to have read it to be able to follow this one. (I mean, if you want to, that's great. But you don't have to.)

It wasn’t standard procedure. An Admiral dealing with the personal effects of one of her officers.

Nobody seemed particularly surprised about it, though. 

Clearly they hadn't flown quite as far below the radar as they'd thought.

Katrina had put it off for as long as she could, hoping that someone else would make it their problem. There were, after all, far more pressing issues demanding her attention. The rebuilding of the entire Federation, for example. The ongoing refugee crisis caused by the destruction of some of the colonies. She didn’t have time to sift through someone else’s junk. But his mother was dead, his father was … difficult, his sister wanted nothing further to do with him, and the three cousins she had managed to track down hadn’t even bothered to respond to her communications. 

No wonder he'd never wanted to talk much about his family.

"You want my advice?” Isabella had said, arms folded, chin tilted, an eyebrow half-raised in an expression that was too familiar and too different all at the same time. “Blow it up. Just blow up the whole damn lot of it. You could sell tickets.”

And Katrina had clenched her fists so tightly under the desk that her nails had left furious crescent dents in her palms.

_ It wasn't him, it was never him, how could you be so  _ stupid  _ as to think that he would  _ ever _ \-- _

“I'm sorry for your loss,” she had replied instead, because everything else, everything that mattered, was classified. 

“I'm not.”

And so, with no-one left to turn to, with everyone who should have cared having washed their hands of him, Katrina found herself standing in front of the storage locker registered to  _ ‘Lorca, Captain G.’ _ with a roll of refuse sacks and a heavy feeling in her stomach.

She took a deep breath. Punched in his access code.

_ N-C-C-1-4-2-2 _

For someone who had spent the best part of his career in Security, Gabriel always had chosen lousy passwords. 

The door slid open.

Behind it was chaos.

Methodically-labelled boxes had been torn from shelves, contents strewn across the floor.

Someone had broken in, someone with a grudge, it wouldn't have been hard with a password that easy to guess--

No.

_ “You still have the locker. I'll come with you, if you like, help you--" _

_ “I can furnish my new office without your assistance,  _ Admiral.  _ Unless you think my judgement has been so badly eroded that--" _

_ “For god’s sake, Gabriel, I don't think that your - look, I don't want to have this argument again.” _

_ “Then stop treating me like a damn invalid.” _

She'd suggested it to him. The other him. After the  _ Buran. _

And he'd ransacked Gabriel’s belongings, just like he had his career, his reputation, his whole life.

Katrina sat on the floor, between the sad heaps of wreckage he'd left behind, and somehow managed to prevent herself from crying.

She had scheduled precisely two hours for this task. The Andorian ambassador was due at 16:00. She needed to stay focused.

Easy things first. A broken tennis racket, two broken tennis rackets, from back when he’d still had time for hobbies, went into a sack. 

A bottle of whisky. A _very_ _nice_ bottle of whisky, now she looked at it properly, one he’d obviously been saving for … something, who knew what, had miraculously survived unscathed. 

It seemed a shame to let it go to waste. 

Keep. 

Assorted rocks she was fairly sure he should have surrendered after whatever mission he’d found them on had ended. One of them was glowing. She wrapped a spare sack around her hand and picked it up cautiously.

Keep, return to Starfleet labs. Get checked for possible radiation poisoning.

Thanks a bunch, Gabriel.

A small box marked _‘Balayna’_. It was impossible to guess what might have been in it now. The seashells, maybe? The fortune cookie slips that blew around the room like confetti. A framed photo, the glass cracked under the weight of a boot, of the two of them at a beach. The seashells, then. 

Gabriel looked happy in the photo. Open. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him like that.

Maybe if they’d ever got their act together--

The seashells and the slips went into the sack; the photo, prised carefully from the frame, went into a new ‘Too Difficult To Deal With Right Now’ pile. 

The copy of _the_ _Odyssey_ she had given him years ago, which she’d always suspected he’d never bothered to read. It had been tossed into a corner and had obviously hit the wall hard along the way. She picked it up. Straightened the front cover.

_ “What is it?” _

_ “An epic poem.” _

_ “Poetry?” He pulled a face. _

_ “Not that kind of poetry. It’s thousands of years old. Try it. You might learn something.” _

_ “From a poem?” _

The pages were well-thumbed, the spine almost broken from use. A few verses had been underlined. 

He’d never mentioned even opening it.

Bastard.

_ Tell me about a complicated man. _

_ Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost… _

Keep.

More photos. Endless photos. Photos of … miscellaneous bits of the  _ Buran,  _ as far as she could work out. Like he'd tried to document every inch of her. The dedication plaque. Corridors. Bits of riveting. The command chair.

He’d been so smug about that chair. 

But, once, just once, when their shore leave had ‘accidentally’ coincided, and they’d ‘accidentally’ ended up very drunk and, not at all accidentally, very, very naked, he’d admitted that he’d been so nervous that he hadn’t even sat in the damn thing for the first two weeks of his post. Avoided it altogether.

_ “It’s not just a chair. You’ve got to earn it.” _

_ “And did you?” _

_ “Not yet. But in the end my legs hurt too much. Had to sit somewhere.” _

Half-asleep. That was when you saw the real Gabriel. When he was somewhere between sleep and awake, guard down, finally. Honest. Unexpectedly soft.

Two hours suddenly didn’t seem like nearly enough time.

The plaque, the corridors, the riveting, all went into the sack. The chair earned its place in the Keep pile.

Photos of the  _ Buran  _ crew. A party. Faces she recognised. Doctor Trephir looking unimpressed. Lieutenant Graav arguing with someone. Commander Jones mortified at whatever terrible joke Gabriel had just told from behind the camera. 

All of them gone. 

She wasn’t sure what to do with the photos. Maybe the families would want them? Maybe not, not if they knew where she’d found them.

Too Difficult.

Photos of her. Photos of Pippa. Photos of the three of them in varying stages of insobriety. Photos that she should destroy to protect their reputations.

Keep. Keep. Keep. Keep keep keep keep keep.  

Actually,  _ that  _ one should definitely go in the sack.

She rattled off a quick communication to her assistant, asking her to stall the ambassador. 

Shirts thrown from the rail at the far end of the room. All sensible, all in various shades of blue. He’d never really got the hang of not being in uniform. Never liked having too much choice.

_ “Don’t you have anything else?” Her fingers tugged critically at the fabric of his shirt.  _

_ He frowned. _

_ “Like what?” _

_ “Something a little more … casual?” _

_ “This _ is  _ casual. And anyway,” he grinned, stepping far too close to her, far too close for sensible thinking, far too close for anything good to come of it, “I didn’t think you were all that fussy about clothes.” _

And he’d been right. 

Bastard. Bastard bastard bastard. 

The shirt in her hands was soft, and familiar. She pressed it to her face, hoping it would reassure her, but it smelled musty, and old, and it only made her feel ridiculous. 

Sack. Donate them somewhere useful.  

On and on it went. 

Keep. Sack. Keep. Keep. Sack. Too Difficult. Keep. Keep. Keep--

At last, late, far too late, her diary for the day in tatters, her assistant furious about the prospect of having to grovel and rearrange an entire evening of meetings that had been almost impossible to schedule in the first place, Katrina sat, dusty, sweaty, exhausted, in front of the carefully-categorised remnants of Gabriel’s life.

She called a porter to help shift things. 

The man on the front desk looked up as she approached. 

“We’ll have to upgrade your account, Admiral,” he said, passing her a PADD to sign. “Your allocation’s all used up.”

“That’s fine. Please do.”

“Having a clear out?” he asked, nodding to the pile of boxes beside her.

“They belonged - belong to a friend,” she replied. “I’m just looking after them. Just for a while.”

That night, back in her quarters, she set aside the reports and the speeches and the urgent, angry messages from the Andorian ambassador, and took out the battered book that she had stuffed into her bag. 

It all but fell open in her hands.

Curled up in a chair, under lamplight, a glass of very,  _ very _ nice whisky set on the table before her - thanks, Gabriel - she began to read.

_ Tell me about a complicated man. _

_ Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost… _

**Author's Note:**

> NCC-1422 is the registry number of the USS _Buran_.
> 
> The translation of _the Odyssey_ I've quoted here is Emily Wilson's beautiful new edition, which I'm reading at the moment, and which makes my nerdy heart happy for so many reasons. Maybe I'll try and do something less heavy-handed with it one day.


End file.
